The Anonymous Widower

National Grid And Emerald AI Announce Strategic Partnership To Demonstrate AI Power Flexibility In The UK

The title of this post, is the same as that of this press release from National Grid.

This is the sub-heading.

National Grid and Emerald AI are partnering to show how AI data centres can support a smarter, more flexible grid.
A UK-first live trial is planned for late 2025 on a grid connected data centre using Emerald AI’s platform.
Targeted for late 2025, the demonstration will use cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs, to dynamically adjust energy consumption
Increased flexibility of data centre consumption can unlock capacity and accelerate connections to the electricity network.

These three introductory paragraphs indicate how the strategy partnership will work.

National Grid and Emerald AI today announced a strategic partnership to demonstrate how AI data centres can work with the transmission network to adjust their energy use in real time, making better use of existing capacity to support the UK’s growing digital needs.

The partners will deliver a live demonstration in the United Kingdom showcasing Emerald Conductor, an AI-powered system that acts as a smart mediator between the grid and a data centre, supporting flexible management of energy demand. Targeted for late 2025, the demonstration will use cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs, dynamically adjust energy consumption, and support grid stability.

The electricity transmission network is designed with built-in redundancy to deliver world-class reliability and keep the lights on for customers. Capacity is typically available outside of peak events like hot summer days or cold winter storms, when there’s high demand for cooling and heating. That means, in many cases, there’s room on the existing grid to connect new data centres, if they can temporarily dial down energy usage during periods of peak demand.

Yesterday, there was an article in The Times which was entitled Octopus Energy Prepares Kraken Software Arm for Potential IPO.

I asked Google AI what Octopus Energy’s Kraken software does and received this answer.

Launched as part of the Octopus Energy Group in 2016, Kraken now serves 70 million household and business energy accounts worldwide through an operating system that processes 15 billion new data points each day. The software underpins Octopus Energy’s customer management and increasingly sophisticated smart tariffs.

I wouldn’t be surprised that similar methodology is used by both Emerald IT and Kraken.

As I have written at least four scheduling algorithms to best allocate available resources to tasks that need to be done for project management and other similar fields, I would have my ideas about the methods used by the two companies.

I am also sure, that the generic algorithm, that I have used in the past, could step up to the plate one more time, if anybody were to be interested.

September 19, 2025 - Posted by AnonW | Computing, Energy | Artificial Intelligence, Emerald AI, Kraken Software, National Grid, Nvidia, Octopus Energy, Project Management